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As a teenager, Eddie Peake hung out on a bleak recreation ground in Finsbury Park, north London, where the middle-class – and I would imagine rather timorous – youngster had the opportunity to mix with “people of every age, class and ethnicity” and immerse himself in street culture: chiefly football, graffiti and dope-smoking. That edgy urban space provides both the title and the inspiration for this exhibition in the vast concrete hangar of White Cube’s Bermondsey gallery, in a show that feels like a love letter to Peake’s home territory.

The first thing you hear on entering through a narrow corridor, painted pinkish-grey in imitation of urban concrete, is the ominous thump and rattle of drum’n’bass music: not a mere soundtrack, but one of the capital’s leading underground radio stations, Kool London, broadcasting live from the show over the six weeks of its duration.

Now in his late thirties, Peake (who is the son of artist Phyllida Barlow and the grandson of Gormenghast author Mervyn Peake) has established himself as one of the leading artists of his generation with works of mildly risqué performance art, including a naked five-a-side football match and a cod-fashion show with painted models dressed only in Reebok trainers. Here he takes on the currently voguish notion of the artist inhabiting or animating the exhibition space. Rather than simply filling the gallery with pieces of his art, Peake will be in residence throughout the show’s run: turning the space into a living artwork by writing poetry on the walls, filling the space with manipulated “field recordings” of Finsbury Park street life and performing repetitive actions which are designed to gradually develop in the manner of the rhythmic “loops” that power drum’n’bass.

This then is an exhibition whose very structure emanates from the grooves of the street – or that certainly seems to be the idea. Large graffiti-inspired abstract paintings line the walls (and the fact that they’re not great is surely the point), while a line of steel tables runs through the middle of the gallery, representing Finsbury Park’s main artery, Stroud Green Road. Many are covered in coloured hair gels from the area’s numerous Afro-Caribbean hair salons.

Rather than attempt to portray Finsbury Park, Peake has brought the area physically into the gallery; though how his own performances relate to this exuberant backdrop is less clear.

The artist at the exhibitionCredit:
Matt Crossick/ EMPICS Entertainment.

When I was there, he emerged from the “office” – his work-space behind the music studio – dressed in a vaguely clown-like white onesie with coloured pom-poms, dragging a green velvet chaise longue. After heaving this disconsolately into a space surrounded by a spiral of white curtains (another play on the “loop” idea), he lay down on the floor and watched a video of one of his earlier pieces, a sort of naked ballet. Later, he used a ladder to climb into a triangular boarded-off area, leaving the small crowd of onlookers waiting cluelessly outside before re-emerging and wandering off with the ladder.

Is Peake, a rather gauche performer for a man of his age, projecting himself back into the role of clownish teenager, sulkily withdrawing into his own fantasies? If that, I’m sure, is an over-literal interpretation, you’re left wanting a more explicit and meaningful connection between the work’s parts than the printed notes’ ponderous blather about Peake “playing himself, both offering and up and dismantling the narrative of artistic ego, fictional protagonist and real self”.

Eddie Peake's Clandestine Hand TouchCredit:
Eddie Peake

Finsbury Park is the place where Peake, in a sense, became an artist: having discovered football and graffiti on the concrete pitch, he experienced an “epiphany”, we’re told, when he realised such things could be part of his art. Yet in turning this formative moment into “contemporary art” in an expensive gallery, he’s created an experience that doesn’t add up to any more than the sum of its parts, and which, for all its initial funky bluster, doesn’t seem particularly deeply felt.

Art today doesn’t tend to deal with things such as passion and intense inner experience: everything become a formal game about how things are seen in art galleries. Peake adheres to this orthodoxy in ways that often feel predictable. The use of those found street sounds, which Peake manipulates from a set of record decks in the centre of the gallery, is the kind of thing that’s been seen a lot recently, not least in Philippe Parreno’s 2016 Tate Modern installation. Dropping in a Raphael portrait beside projections of his own naked performances might be a detail, but it is again just the kind of thing you expect to see in an art gallery today. In Concrete Pitch, inner city grit and art world high-glitz meet head-on, and it feels like the latter very much wins.